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Aug 11-17, 1999

Aug 11-17, 1999 / Vol. 15 / No. 32

The ‘Blair’ up there

I get livid every time I hear a lottery winner tell a reporter that her unexpected windfall isn’t going to change her personality. If you can’t respond to sudden success by quitting your job with no notice and dumping the dreary little rubes you used to call friends, then what good is the money in…

Steve Schneider

Where the wild things are

Right now monitor lizards from Malaysia are padding around DeLand on clawed, scaly feet. Poke a stick under a bush in Orlando’s Conway neighborhood and you might turn up a napping peacock. South American monk parrots have found their way to Kissimmee, and oblivious chickens cluck outside a Popeye’s in Oviedo. The roughly 600 macaque…

Theresa Everline

Pot crock

Not since the movie “Reefer Madness,” with its absurdly exaggerated fear-mongering about marijuana, has the War on Drugs offered such a belly laugh. Now, courtesy of Florida’s new drug czar comes “Killer Fungus Touted to Eradicate State Pot Crop!” Fresh from Washington, D.C., Jim McDonough is putting down roots in Tallahassee. This pusher of fungal…

Andrea Brunais

Looking for the waste

The state and Orlando Sentinel have agreed to embark on a search for buried waste barrels in an attempt to learn whether in the 1970s the newspaper dropped potentially toxic chemicals in a former Altamonte Springs dump. Charles Collins, a project manager for the state Department of Environmental Protection, recently met with a Sentinel safety…

Ericson, Edward Jr.

Better laughing through chemistry

As I write this, the Go Lounge downtown isn’t closed, but I miss it. I’ll miss it even more when it’s actually gone. I’ve done a lot of things in there that I’m glad weren’t captured on film. It wasn’t closed when I was sitting there on a Mondo Mod Monday (my favorite night) and…

Liz Langley

Holes in their theory

In July, the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., finally got around to forming a committee of physicists whose job it is to ascertain if the lab’s replication of the Big Bang (scheduled for later in 1999) could possibly backfire and destroy the Earth. The lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider will begin…

Chuck Shepherd

The right place, the Wright time

Shannon Wright is a clear-eyed survivor. The music business had her down and disillusioned, but the singer/songwriter refused to give up or give in. “I saw the truth, the matter-of-factivity of what the business is about,” says Wright. “The majority of it sucks.” Central Florida may best remember Wright as the waifish frontwoman of the…

Phil Bailey

Carnival barkers

Seen by most as a curious side project of Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, Mr. Bungle has always lurked in the shadows of mainstream rock music. It hasn’t helped that the three Bungle releases — including the band’s latest, the schizophrenic pop surprise “California” — don’t fall neatly into any particular category of music,…

Mark Padgett

Walking the mean streets of desire

Even back in my day, “breakin’ up was hard to do.” All of us remember the drama and trauma of relationships as part of our search for meaning and our incubation into adulthood. And what may seem trite and melodramatic in retrospect was momentous and truly painful when we were going through it. In the…

Al Krulick

Festival puts a Hitch in your plans

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear he planned it this way. Alfred Hitchcock, the beloved, bejowled maestro of the macabre, would have turned 100 years old this Friday — that’s the 13th, for those not keeping as watchful an eye on their calendars as their cutlery drawers. The mischievous Hitch would likely be amused…

Steve Schneider

Picture-perfect dessert option

Here’s a novel way to put those favorite snapshots to use: Have them scanned for a “photo cake” at Charlie’s Gourmet Pastries.They’ll feed your photo into their new computer, which transfers the image onto a sheet cake with white icing (starting at $18). The possibilities are endless: Elvis cakes, birthday-girl cakes, bon voyage cakes. The…

Orlando Weekly Staff

For simple folks

When we stepped into Chuck’s Restaurant, the small and unassuming spot was all too eerily familiar. It’s like thousands of other typical neighborhood diners around the country that time has forgotten – faded walls, a torn booth seat here and there, filmy curtains that block the midday glare of the bleached-out highway outside, a cheery…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Picture-perfect dessert option

Here’s a novel way to put those favorite snapshots to use: Have them scanned for a “photo cake” at Charlie’s Gourmet Pastries. They’ll feed your photo into their new computer, which transfers the image onto a sheet cake with white icing (starting at $18). The possibilities are endless: Elvis cakes, birthday-girl cakes, bon voyage cakes.…

Colleen Moore

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